This invention relates generally to a unique seafood product, one example being a crustacean product similar to shrimp, and to a process for making that product from comminuted fish meat.
The process of mechanically deboning of fish meat has received increasing attention during the last twenty years throughout the world in order to utilize efficiently nutritious proteinaceous resources, such as numerous underutilized marine species. Many efforts have been made recently to produce less expensive, more attractive, more acceptable fabricated products for human consumption from mechanically deboned fish meat.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,303,008, there is disclosed a process for producing a restructured food product from fish meat paste; however, that process is complex, and requires elevated pressurization of the paste in a mold during cooking.
There is need for a simple, reliable process to produce a fish paste crustacean product such as a shrimp as well as other similar products, without requiring pressurization of the product in the mold; and there is need for a process as disclosed herein, and which produces a superior product simulating the shape of a shrimp body, the head of which has been separated from the body, as by manual pull. Such shrimp-like products desirably have random or orientations of neck strands. Also, there is need for process producing a shrimp or lobster product which is juicy and tender, the meat of which is not undesirably compressed, and which has the texture and shape of the crustacean, part of which has been separated by pull-off from the body or remainder of the crustacean.